Internships are meant to be opportunities for learning and to gain
experience. At their best, they can be. But the draw of cheap labor for
employers means that they often aren't – and that the supposed
"opportunity to learn" is only emphasized to obscure the lack of compensation for interns who are actually just doing work.

That
internships are unpaid or poorly paid means that only those with means
can even afford to take them, but that's where their "privilege" ends.
Interns – predominantly young, inexperienced, temporary and poorly
protected – are the unrecognized workers at the very bottom of the
professional food chain.

Driven by fear of a bad economy and the
fantasy of "getting a foot in the door", hordes of young graduates put
up with a lot: underpaid and ignored almost by definition, interns have
also been sexually harassed and even worked to death.
But with next to no bargaining power and reluctant to complain for fear
of jeopardizing their “future success” (the promised lure of all
internships), interns have only recently begun to challenge such
conditions .

The critical issue is, of course, pay. "There's a
value associated with paid work that isn't necessarily there when you're
working for free," said Juno Turner, the lawyer for the interns who sued Fox Searchlight last year for not paying them on the set of Black Swan. And Turner says that there's plenty of research
to prove it: the National Association of Colleges and Employers, for
example, has consistently found that paid interns are more likely to be
hired and start with better salaries than their unpaid brethren.

That
is why internship culture is so deeply flawed – being poorly paid is
synonymous with being poorly valued, and it's given rise to a wider
culture of denigration around internships. But while the growing intern labor rights movement
is making impressive strides in addressing issues like wages, sexual
harassment and discrimination in the workplace, what will it take to
actually change how we think about interns?

As the saying goes,
there is no such thing as degrading work, only degraded workers – and in
the case of interns, this degradation is as cultural as it is economic.
Every intern wants to do the "real", substantive work of the industry
in which they're working, and should have the opportunity to do so. But
the truth is we often don't, and it has consequences for how interns are
treated more generally.

The trope of the coffee-fetching and
photocopy-wielding intern is marked for degradation not only because
anything we're expected to do is seen as the requisite pound of flesh we
must pay to join the workforce, but precisely because such labor is
itself deemed unworthy of payment – or respect – by employers. The idea
that an internship can be a mutually beneficial and respectful
transaction among equals has therefore become a casualty of the culture
that surrounds all undervalued and underpaid work.

Interns form a part of the professionalized workforce that is expected to be both obedient and unseen – a group in which women,
migrants and others doing marginalized (or otherwise denigrated) work
have long labored, and historically, under far worse and far more
precarious conditions.

When we question the notion that all
interns are is expendable labor, or that interns should be grateful for
their work, we're also challenging a professional caste-system dictating
that your worth as an individual is solely determined by the work that
you do.

The case against unpaid internships no longer needs to be
made – it's inherently exploitative, open only to the few who can afford
it and mostly illegal (with some exceptions). But the case to change the fundamental relations of power undergirding internship culture still does.

Paying
interns is one step toward recognizing their value, and it's one that
holds the potential to radically recast the social relations of the
office. Because it's crucial to recognize interns as workers, but it's
equally important that employers see them as individuals, too.

Brief Profile Summary: Iam Elikunda M.Materu currently working as News Anchor at EATV & EA Radio, with BA,in Journalism (Major Public Relations) and Holder of Masters in Business Administration (Major in Marketing and Entrepreneurship (MBA).
My passion lies in seeing others wake up to their God-given talents and using them in as diverse fields as possible. I am the bearer of good news and this I do on the radio, Television and through social networks
I am most talented creative thinker, Graphic designer and IT Technician currently owning Event consultancy agency called Intelligent Business Solutions, which now has two major firm known as Intelligent Fast Food and Intelligent Classic Wear.
Having come from humble beginnings, I believe in the power of having faith in God and believing in yourself enough to see your dreams become a reality. I believe in the maxim "no pain, no gain", because real success comes at a real cost.
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